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30.12.02
page 116, cahier 3, from the Diaries of Witold Kazersamski:
I arrived at Rome Stazioni Termini as dawn was breaking. Outside, the neighborhood sweltered with pickpockets and gangs of thieving children. Signore Antonio Pignatelli was supposed to meet me here and was nowhere to be found. A typical scene. I pulled out my tobacco and was just beginning to roll a cigarette when an English speaking cretin stepped toward me, calling my name gently. In his hand was a small cardboard sign that bore my name. He attempted to shake my hand, claiming he was Chuck, sent by Mr. Pignatelli to pick me up since Mr. Pignatelli had been delayed. Chuck appeared to be in his early thirties, sporting an unhealthy complexion, puny frame, round shoulders and a surprisingly prominent paunch. His hair, which looked as though it has been cropped by a pair of blunt shears, was very greasy. I could have filled a mason jar with the grease in his hair. His clothes were total grunge. A dirty nylon rucksack was crumpled at his feet like an abadoned baby. I wondered out loud why Antonio Pignatelli had sent such a seedy and slovenly looking guy to meet me. "I'm the only guy he could find on such short notice who speaks English as my native tongue." he explained as he picked up the rucksack and led me by the elbow toward a cafe where we could sit for an espresso and some bread while we waited for Antonio to arrive.
As we sat there, another broken-English-speaker, who must have overheard our conversation, scuttled in from off the street toward us like a cockroach toward a pile of bread crusts and sugar. "'Allo, my name is Jirko" he stammers and then asks us if either can spare a few euros for some paintings of his. He asks us both but of course, he is speaking only to me. Chuck doesn't look like he has any money. He looks like he'd be as likely as Jirko to be panhandling, perhaps more so. Jirko's lustreless hair matted in some kind of grease, or perhaps it is turpentine, judging from the smell. His fingers are paint-stained, the nails long and filthy. He too has a rucksack and from this one, he pulls out a few vague, almost hallucinatory charcol etchings, explaining all the while that he lives in a
squalid condominium on the slummy eastern fringes of the city where he rents a small, damp room in the basement; broken down into the submission of poverty teaching haphazard english classes, giving black market tours of Rome to wary english language tourists charging 2 euros for an hour per. I wave him off, spitting to the side of his shoes and looking out for the waiter or someone to chase away these vagrants. Others are beginning to take notice, their vagrant, gypsy antennae picking up the scent of money in the neighborhood at this early hour.
Finally, Chuck loses his apathetic demeanor and waves the butter knife in the direction of Jirko and a few other slowly approaching vagrants. "Get away fuckers! Liberty is not a release from all law, from all restraint! Crawl back into your sewers and gutters! Stay away I warn you or this distinguished gentleman with me will be forced to brandish his fire arm and fire it at you indiscriminantly!"
He flops down next to me, smiling but a little sweaty. The sidewalks have cleared. "One thing I've learned" he begins, lighting a cigarette and flagging down the waiter impatiently, "is that the consumerist impulse, even in junkies, drives us all toward personal satisfactions that we never quite experience without a solipsistic sense of loneliness hounding us. We may need love and self-opening in order to achieve genuine intimacy and commitment with even a few others."
The waiter arrives glancing at us and having heard the shouting, relieved but curious as to where the vagrants disappeared to. Chuck smiles, "You see?" he demands of the waiter, lighting a cigarette and coughing heavily. "John Stuart Mill’s harm principle, that no one has a right to interfere with me for my own good, but only to prevent harm to others” is now generally accepted. The streets are clear of riff raff. So bring us a pair of espressos, a bottle of Pernod and perhaps a few chunks of bread, rapidamente! senza ritardo!
Chuck continues, puffing on his cigarette proudly like a pimp. "Signore Pignatelli has been looking forward to your visit. I don't expect this delay should be long. He's had some difficulties lately with potentially destructive ideals but frankly, I think the worst is over. If he hasn't arrived within the half hour, I'll take you to a fine pensione I know of only a few blocks from here."
"What exactly are these 'difficulties' you speak of?" I ask with only a vague sense of curiosity. The espresso has arrived and it's aroma overtakes me, overtakes the smell of pigeons and unwashed sidewalks. Train station neighborhoods always smell the same. Like poverty and ammonia mixed with illicit sex and stale urine.
"Well, I'm no shrink, but I think he has to stop looking for salvation to come to him from somewhere else, from above. Instead, I suggested to him only yesterday, he should seek to reconcile with reality. After all, there is no external measure of the meaningfulness of our lives and practices. He wallows in his insignificance, the meaningless of his life, and it paralyses him at times with terrible fits of depression. I slipped him a mild amphetamine sulphate. I'm sure he'll be ok in a little while. Then he'll come to pick you up and everything will continue on as planned." Chuck stared at his fingernails awhile as I thought about how Mr. Pignatelli's affliction might affect his ability to help me locate some leads about Anastasia. It didn't look good. I cursed loudly to myself, much to Chuck's surprise, who took up a defensive Yang Tai Chi position on the other end of the table.
"Sorry about that. I'm just a little annoyed at having come all the way from Kaunas and a meeting with the pianist Vyacheslav Ganelin regarding a concert to be performed in the Siberian city of Sverdlovsk, only to find out now that Mr. Pignatelli is suffering from some sort of dysthymia or bipolar disorder. I was urgently counting on his assistance."
"Don't worry about it." Chuck assured, picking up his rucksack and rifling through it for a few scraps of paper which he handed over to me. "These are the remains of the records of his therapeutic foster home stay. It suggests only a minor depressive disorder brought on by the ill-advised use of estrogen which he'd hoped would improve the somatic and mild depressive symptoms but in the end, only seemed to fuck up his system worse. He should be completely recovered in a matter of days, perhaps weeks, but for the time being, so long as he's jacked up with a little Japanese shabu or alot of caffeine, he's fine for long periods of time. Whatever he's supposed to help you with, I'm certain he'll be functional for long enough periods of time to assist you. Believe me, if he couldn't, he wouldn't have invited you here."
Just then there was a jaunty horn honking from the street as a dioxazine purple Alfa Romeo 156 GTA pulled up to the curb with Antonio's delicate hand waving out the driver's side window. He lept from the car, the engine still idling, and shouted out greetings to both of us. "Witold! Chuck! What great fortune that I've finally found you! I was caught up in an accident with a chestnut roaster and got caught up in the irrisistable, musky fragrants of the chestuts on Via Nazionale and then stopped for a few moments of reflection where Mussolini used to harangue the crowds from the balcony of the Palazzo Venezia. I feel like a tourist again! What a morning!"
He quickly grabbed my bags and tossed them into the trunk of the Alfa Romeo and motioned me into the passenger's seat. "Chuck!" he screeched. "Meet us at the New Mississippi Jazz Club on Borgo Angelico tonight around 10! Bring Adriana and Camelia with you!" As I carefully folded my legs in the passenger seat, Antonio fell in behind the steering wheel, yanked the car into gear and floored it, yanking me backwards. We were on our way to what Antonio told me in very speedy explanation was his September home in Rome. First, a quick bite to eat, a few bottles of wine, a nap and then we would get down to business...
4:44 PM
29.12.02
From the sweat-soaked pages of the Diaries of Witold Kazersamski, cahier 8, page 312, 12th month without ovaries:
The kiosk around the corner from my flat finally removed it's hand-printed cardboard and water-logged "Back in Fifteen Minutes" sign after 3 long weeks. The fat, pinched face of the old Ukranian woman which had occupied the kiosk window during the summer months has been removed by state officials apparently, replaced with a pretty Latvian woman who wears far too much make up and doesn't smile, not even when she is in pain. I went there this morning, shocked that it had reopened, and fully prepared to ransack the inside for whatever seasonal fruit might be in stock and a few bottles of watered down vodka. She didn't greet me when I rang the service bell, continuing, instead, to smoke rancid black tobacco cigarettes and eat crudely sliced slabs of raw herring while staring at me blankly.
"What have you got in stock this morning?" I demanded, fingering the stolen food stamp coupons in my pockets and the rusting spare change I'd picked up from the fire escape the night before when looking for the cat. "Nothing" she said, crusts of black bread falling from the corner of her mouth as she continued to stuff oily pinches of raw herring into one side of her mouth while puffing on the cigarette from the other side of her mouth. The whole thing was beginning to disgust me. I hadn't had breakfast yet, my stomach was still burning acids from drinking on an empty stomach the night before and I hadn't even seen the morning's headlines. I rang the service bell again, repeatedly and with rancor. "Don't tell me nothing!" I demand, slamming my fist on the counter. "What possible reason would this kiosk have for reopening if there was nothing in stock?" I thought it was a sensible question but apparently, the Latvian woman didn't. She laughed aloud, more food chunks falling out of her mouth, half masticated and dripping with drool. "Who do you think you are?" she demanded suddenly, slapping her own meaty paw on the counter. "You want everything on credit, another bottle of beer, another stale crust of bread, another fresh ear of corn? Show me your money!"
I counted to ten and inhaled deeply, thinking for a moment about how Ernest Renan, the famous French historian and archeologist, would respond. He once said "As a rule, all heroism is due to a lack of reflection, and thus it is necessary to maintain a mass of imbeciles. If they once understand themselves the ruling men will be lost." I decided not to think, exhaled instead and spat on the sidewalk. "Perhaps I can make it worth your while," I hinted slyly, thinking of the machete I still kept in my bathroom for emergencies. "I know where to get my hands on some controlled bleeding experiment videos." The Latvian looked at me skeptically. I could tell she wasn't interested, but I could also tell that she was wanted badly to go back to her privacy, her eating binges, her cigarettes and that by looking at me, she had a sneaking suspicion I wouldn't be easily put off. When she tried to slam the kiosk window shut on my fingers, I jerked my arm up and blocked it, wagging the index finger of my other hand in her face. "Please madam. I have good reason to believe I'm experiencing a Subarachnoid hemorrhage and frankly, if I don't get some fresh fruit, a few eggs and this morning's newspaper, I can't guarantee you're going to come out of this interaction with any teeth left to chew those disgusting nodules of raw herring with, if you know what I mean..."
She muttered to herself, cursing under her breath. "It is people like you who drove that poor woman who used to run this kiosk before to an early bankruptcy and possibly to her grave. No one pays for anything in this neighborhood. Don't any of you have jobs? How do you live with yourselves?" She seemed genuinely concerned and irritated but her demeanor was relaxing. She set down her raw herring and bread, ground her cigarette out in a dead cactus plant beside the window and motioned for me to enter through the small opening of a side door. "You may take one egg, two pieces of stale grapefruit, one onion and a bottle of Somalian apple wine but as for the newspaper, you are on your own. They never delivered any copies this morning."
With great relief, I burst through the opening without waiting for her to finish her sentence or begin a new lecture. People like this want to bend your ear all day if they think they can get away with it. When I stood back up from my knees, finally inside the kiosk, I got a full look at the fire hydrant body of the Latvian. It wasn't a pretty sight, unexercised, poorly washed, blotchy in places with some sort of infectious rash with open sores. She had draped a wool blanket over her shoulders to keep off the cold but otherwise wore only a pair of combat boots and pajama bottoms with peanut butter and strawberry juice stains all over them. Her breasts hung like fleshy stalactites which began at her sternum and sagged down to her ribs, unappealing and moist with sweat. She looked like the fat peasant woman in Diego Rivera's "La Molendera". I repressed a surge of bile that nearly erupted from the back of my throat and went to work rooting through the bins of stale fruit and rotting vegetables.
I was able to emerge a few minutes later from the kiosk, grateful for the fresh figs I'd pocketed on the sly when she was writing down my bill on a chalkboard. The thought of my departure, now that I had what I wanted, caused a brief sensation of regret in Latvian's heart. I could tell. She grimaced as though she'd been punched in the stomach. "You've stolen my prized figs!" she screeched suddenly, trying to grab at me through the kiosk window. I jerked away, laughing as I skipped down the sidewalk toward the bus stop. I had to move on. The public library would be open again in a matter of hours and there was still the matter of the bottle of Pernod to filch from the cafe around the corner before I attempted to board the bus and fight my way through the last vestiges of the late morning rush hour tide. Once I had the Pernod, I could bribe the bus driver to take me past the last stop to the public library and then my afternoon of figs and Mozart could begin.
2:34 PM
From reading between the lines of the Diaries of Witold Kazersamski, cahier 12, verse 2, scribbled over with Rammstein lyrics and covered in stale beer:
In an after-hours boozer, long ago lost in the Pigalle's old, hilly curvy cobblestones streets, ash cement buildings, cracked paint and steep lamp lighted stairways, I wandered into the basement of a candelit club, seated myself and spotted what I immediately mistook for Edith Piaf, the temptuous little street singer dressed in a black, hand knitted dress, a borrowed scarf hiding a missing sleeve and waited patiently for her set. She'd just come in from outside the cafe, lighting a cigarette in the light rain, I'd followed her in. I'd spent nearly $150,000 on two luncheon spreads for her and another $28,000 to spruce up a trio of meals with flowers during her visit to my flat in October. Both times I'd been thwarted by these anti-artists, satan impersonators with vile and violent, vitamin-induced histories of hating people who created. They got especially angry whenever we tried to create anything beautiful and lasting. The bastards had arrested more than 1,200 of us in the past two months in an unprecedented campaign against us. The latest round of bullying and name calling at the cafe was particularly unnerving.
Around 7:30 P.M. Friday, two anti-artists from the nearby chic neighborhood of Sud Gauche in the Vile Capitalist Pig area infiltrated Cafe Breugal from the cafe's overflowing cesspool of a restroom. For the most part, Cafe Breugal is not surrounded by a razor wire; there is a relatively porous fence of flowers and love on the cafe's southwest side, near the placards of naked angels. The anti-artists chose to infiltrate the fenced-off area. They cut into the fence (even though it ends just a few dozen meters from the site of entry), and entered the cafe's ornate gold gene pool. The two men wore evening gowns, carried cans of spray paint and bottles of olive oil and were loaded with perfume.
Cafe Breugal, located just a short distance from the fence, is a cramped, dimly-lit building, and the anti-artists chose it as their target. At the time, dozens of poets and tap dancers were gathered in the ground-floor mosh pit, waiting for the Friday night Happy Hour to begin. The two anti-artists began to spray the building with perfume from the outside; one managed to get inside, via a service entrance, and entered a bar area next to the distillery.
Four unarmed poets and rhetoriticians were working in the beer kitchen at the time. Spraying at short range, the anti-artists drenched Lawrence Kreptke from Gutenburg, Mishmash Mosh from Lower Slaggery, Kibby Grooch from Chacha and Vopcop Stupidovich from East Beatlemania, with perfume and then sprayed pro-Greed slogans over their exposed genitalia.
The anti-artists then tried to enter the inside of a keg, but found that the tap was latched shut. Our poor penmanship security officials subsequently said that the locked door prevented an even more devastating attack, but they were unable to clarify who had locked the door. One version has Grooch locking the door before he was drenched, to protect his cafe colleagues and fellow alchoholics; his manuscripts were found close to the door. Alternatively, the men in the keg might have locked the tap from their side. The anti-artist, in any case, pissed against the door, wounding five rap artists in the mosh pit, one seriously and the others lightly. The wounded were taken to Beer Intraveinous Feeding Center.
"Singers, vocalists, artists...all must suffer the jackboot of justice if we are to keep the streets clear." Someone high in the administration claimed. Though Ministry of Culture inspectors have been speaking to poets and wood sculptors at sites they have searched, they made their first request to interview an artist privately on Tuesday. We don't know which of us it will be yet. "Whoever dares to strike a poet and his or her work will pay a high price," the official Poet army newspaper, Guns N Butter, said in an editorial. "The beating of typewriters, the noise of snapping pencils, the sending of incoherent telegrams, the mobilizing of new literary canons will neither frighten nor terrorize the Poets," said the newspaper. "No sort of grammar crimes will break the will and aspirations of the people of ArtLand for a peaceful life," the poodle held by leash in the hands of Russian Poet Igor Shamaroyakovski was quoted as saying, sometime, in the privacy of a closet and under his breath, other times with a bull horn and a wet, snapping towel.
Meanwhile, an international four-man debate team reported by satellite telephone Saturday that they had reached the Metro on foot, the goal of a creativity fund-raising trek. "We have just got the tent up and put our feet up, so we're all very well. We have gone through the night without sleep so we are pretty bushed," Mr. Won Liski told the agency, wobbling abit over too much cognac and unfiltered cigarettes. "By tomorrow we plan to have taken our first Metro ride and written our first group haiku about it. The tribesmen of me-first poets and hand-me-down musicians used loudspeakers to call on people to come out of their houses to rewrite the Metro maps in an foreign language no one understands because, they said, "Ice cream melts and soon so much will melt, even the dogs will be forced to leave the area."
I told Edith later, after sitting down at her table and waving down a few stragglers from a marching band outside that had just made it's way around the corner, that I wasn't in love with her. I told her that when I see her, I get itchy, an exacerbation of flea infestation or something, but that I couldn't resist coming for a visit to guzzle Absinthe and act like an idiot in a public place. She told me "I don’t even know who the chief horticulture critic of The Turpentine Post is!" To which I responded, "You will!" and walked out. I've had it with her theatrics. She can go to hell. I just wanted to hear a few songs.
My surrogate coloring book partner said there were two aspects to the Edith Piaf story that needed focus. The first, What did I intend to say? The second, What are my true thoughts on the subject? Well, I'm a super hiphop posterchild, I admit. I intended on telling Edith that it is a dismal story of torture, censorship and corruption, stretching back over two decades and filling thousands of pages of kindergarden finger painting reports. I also wanted to raise the question of whether the French – especially her, with her self-imposed mission to promote urinary tract infections and poor grooming habits – can afford the luxury of behaving like any other tourist when it comes to choosing a holiday destination.
As I tell my surrogate coloring book partner, I grow a little red in the face of course. My blood pressure has tripled since I started my high fiber diet a few nights ago in a midnight ceremony. He doesn't appear impressed with my encyclopedic knowledge of Edith Piaf's grooming habits. I want to kick him in the side of the head repeatedly, but I still hadn't addressed the second aspect of the story he said needed focus. My true thought on the subject is, as with all shock therapies the going was tough. It was 10 or more years before my complexion and hair style began to turn around some of the plagerists and made my fashion show industry one of the best in the world. Today, more than half of my shoes have never been worn and those shoes allow at least 3.5 million flies to continue to find a home. Tens of thousands of flies have chosen either my shoes or my breath as a base from which to export to unrepentent nannies. Edith Piaf either never noticed or never cared and frankly, I just didn't have time for that kind of misguided behavior.
In the end, she came back at me with both fists after I'd gotten up from the table and chased me with a brandy snifter filled with cat urine. My surrogate coloring book partner is beginning to get the picture. He drew one in fact, sighing loudly and adding "What will happen is that, in suburban and outlying areas, little will change and those who want to carry on drinking will be forced into town centres, as they are now. The rowdy binge-drinking culture there will continue."
I hope he is wrong. I still think Edith will come to her senses in time.
12:57 PM
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